The great bridge the epic story of the building of the brooklyn bridge ( PDFDrive )

Paul Gugliotta of New York, architectand engineer, said some things over lunch one day years ago that started methinking about doing such a book and later very kindly walked the bridge w

For my mother and father

WHEN I began this book I was setting out to do something that had not been donebefore I wanted to tell the story of the most famous bridge in the world and inthe context of the age from which it sprang The Brooklyn Bridge has beenphotographed, painted, engraved, embroidered, analyzed as a work of art and as

a cultural symbol; it has been the subject of a dozen or more magazine articlesand one famous epic poem; it has been talked about and praised more it wouldseem than anything ever built by Americans But a book telling the full story ofhow it came to be, the engineering involved, the politics, the difficultiesencountered, the heroism of its builders, the impact it had on the lives andimaginations of ordinary people, a book that would treat this important historicalevent as a rare human achievement, had not been written and such was my goal

I was also greatly interested in the Roeblings, about whom quite a little hadbeen written, but not for some time or from the kind of research I had in mind.Moreover, a good deal of legend about the Roeblings—father, son, and daughter-in-law—still persisted, along with considerable confusion It seemed to me thatthe story of these remarkable people deserved serious study It is anextraordinary story, to say the least, not only in human terms, but in what itreveals about America in the late nineteenth century, a time that has not beenaltogether appreciated for what it was

And beyond that I had a particular interest in the city of Brooklyn itself,having spent part of my life there, when my wife and I were first married, in ahouse just down the street from where Washington and Emily Roebling oncelived

But early in my research another objective emerged It became clear thatthis, to a large degree, was to be Washington Roebling’s book There was, forexample, that day in the library at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute when Iunlocked a large storage closet to see for the first time shelf after shelf of hisnotebooks, scrapbooks, photographs, letters, blueprints, old newspapers he hadsaved, even the front-door knocker to his house in Brooklyn No one knew thenwhat all was in the collection There were boxes of his papers that had not beenopened in years, bundles of letters that so far as I could tell had been examined

by nobody The excitement of the moment can be imagined The contents of thecollection, plus those in another large collection at Rutgers University, both ofwhich are described in the Bibliography, were such that they often left me withthe odd feeling of actually having known the Chief Engineer of the bridge Hewas not only the book’s principal character, he was the author’s main personalcontact with that distant day and age So it has also been my aim to convey, withall the historical accuracy possible, just what manner of man this was who builtthe Brooklyn Bridge, who achieved so much against such staggering odds, andwho asked so little

I am not an engineer and the technical side of the research has often beenslow going for me But though I have written the book for the general reader, Ihave not bypassed the technical side If I could make it clear enough that I couldunderstand it, if it was interesting to me, then my hope was that it would be bothclear and interesting to the reader

During my years of research and writing I have been extremely fortunate inthe assistance I have received from many people and I should like to express tothem my abiding gratitude For their kindnesses and help I wish to thank thelibrarians at both Rutgers and Rensselaer and in particular Miss Irene K.Lionikis of the Rutgers Library and Mrs Orlyn LaBrake and Mrs AdrienneGrenfell of the library at Rensselaer Herbert R Hands of the American Society

of Civil Engineers, David Plowden, Dr Milton Mazer, Dr Roy Korson,Professor of Pathology at the University of Vermont, W H Pearson, Sidney W.Davidson, J Robert Maguire, Charlotte La Rue of the Museum of the City ofNew York, Regina M Kellerman, William S Goodwin, Allan R Talbot, JohnTalbot, and Jack Schiff, the engineer in charge of New York’s East River bridges,each contributed to the research And Dr Paul Gugliotta of New York, architectand engineer, said some things over lunch one day years ago that started methinking about doing such a book and later very kindly walked the bridge with

me and answered many questions

I am especially indebted to Robert M Vogel, Curator, Division ofMechanical and Civil Engineering at the Smithsonian Institution, to John A

Kouwenhoven, authority on New York City history and on James B Eads, toNomer Gray, bridge engineer, who has made his own extensive technical studies

of the bridge, and to Charlton Ogburn, author and friend Each of them read themanuscript and offered numerous critical suggestions, but any errors in fact orjudgment that may appear in the book are entirely my own

I would like to acknowledge, too, the contribution of three members of theRoebling family: Mr Joseph M Roebling of Trenton and Mr F W Roebling,also of Trenton, who gave of their time to talk with me about their forebears, andMrs James L Elston of Fayetteville, Arkansas, who let me borrow an old familyscrapbook

I am grateful for the research facilities and assistance offered by the staffs ofthe following: the Trenton Free Public Library; the Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh;the Brooklyn Public Library; the Long Island Historical Society, Brooklyn, andparticularly to Mr John H Lindenbusch, its executive director; the NewportHistorical Society, Newport, Rhode Island; the Library of Congress; the NewYork Historical Society; the New York Public Library; the Engineering SocietiesLibrary, New York; the Middlebury College Library, Middlebury, Vermont; theBaker Library, Dartmouth College; the Putnam County Historical Society andthe Julia Butterfield Memorial Library at Cold Spring, New York; and the ButlerCounty Library, Butler, Pennsylvania

I wish also to acknowledge my indebtedness to two valued friends who are

no longer living—to Conrad Richter, for his encouragement and example, and toClarence A Barnes, my father-in-law, who was born on Willow Street onBrooklyn Heights, when the bridge was still unfinished, and who could talkbetter than anyone I knew about times gone by

Lastly I would like to express my thanks to Paul R Reynolds, who providessteady encouragement and sound advice; to Peter Schwed, Publisher of Simonand Schuster, who had faith in the idea from the start; to Jo Anne Lessard, whotyped the manuscript; to my children, for their confidence and optimism; and to

my wife, Rosalee, who helped more than anyone

—DAVID MCCULLOUGH

1 The Plan

The shapes arise!

—Walt Whitman

THEY MET at his request on at least six different occasions, beginning in February

1869 With everyone present, there were just nine in all—the seven distinguishedconsultants he had selected; his oldest son, Colonel Washington Roebling, whokept the minutes; and himself, the intense, enigmatic John Augustus Roebling,wealthy wire rope manufacturer of Trenton, New Jersey, and builder ofunprecedented suspension bridges

They met at the Brooklyn Gas Light Company on Fulton Street, where thenew Bridge Company had been conducting its affairs until regular offices could

be arranged for They gathered about the big plans and drawings he had ondisplay, listening attentively as he talked and asking a great many questions.They studied his preliminary surveys and the map upon which he had drawn astrong red line cutting across the East River, indicating exactly where heintended to put the crowning work of his career

The consultants were his idea In view of “the magnitude of the undertakingand the large interests connected therewith,” he had written, it was “only right”

that his plans be “subjected to the careful scrutiny” of a board of experts He didnot want their advice or opinions, only their sanction If everything went as hewanted and expected, they would approve his plan without reservation Theywould announce that in their considered professional opinion his bridge wasperfectly possible They would put an end to the rumors, silence the critics,satisfy every last stockholder that he knew what he was about, and he could atlast get on with his work.

To achieve his purpose, to wind up with an endorsement no one couldchallenge, or at least no one who counted for anything professionally, he hadpicked men of impeccable reputation None had a failure or black mark to hisname All were sound, practical builders themselves, men not given to offhandendorsements or to overstatement With few exceptions, each had done his ownshare of pioneering at one time or other, and so theoretically ought still to besympathetic to the untried They were, in fact, about as eminent a body of civilengineers as could have been assembled then, and seen all together, with theirdisplay of white whiskers, their expansive shirt fronts and firm handshakes, theymust have appeared amply qualified to pass judgment on just about anything.The fee for their services was to be a thousand dollars each, which was exactly athousand dollars more than Roebling himself had received for all his own effortsthus far

Chairman of the group was the sociable Horatio Allen, whose great girth,gleaming bald head, and Benjamin Franklin spectacles gave him the look of acharacter from Dickens He fancied capes and silver-handled walking sticks andprobably considered his professional standing second only to that of Roebling,which was hardly so But like Roebling he had done well in manufacturing—inhis case, with New York’s Novelty Iron Works—and forty years before he had

made some history driving the first locomotive in America, the Stourbridge

Lion, all alone and before a big crowd, on a test run at Honesdale, Pennsylvania.

He had also, in the time since, been one of the principal engineers for NewYork’s Croton Aqueduct and so was sometimes referred to in biographicalsketches as “the man who turned the water on.”

Then there was Colonel Julius Adams of Brooklyn, a former Army engineer,who was usually described as an expert on sewer construction, and who, in truth,was not quite in the same league as the others He had, however, a number ofinfluential friends in Brooklyn and for years he had been dabbling with designsfor an East River bridge of his own For a while it had even looked as though hemight be given the chance to build it When Roebling’s proposal was first madepublic, he had been among those to voice sharp skepticism That he had beenincluded as a consultant at this stage was taken by some as a sign that Roebling

William Jarvis McAlpine, of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, was the president

of the American Society of Civil Engineers Kindly, genial, widely respected, hehad built the enormous dry dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Albany WaterWorks, and a fair number of bridges He was also the proud possessor of whatmust have been the most elaborate jowl whiskers in the profession and he wasthe one man in the group, the two Roeblings included, who had had anyfirsthand experience working with compressed-air foundations, or caissons, asthey were called, which, in this particular case, was regarded as an attribute ofmajor proportions

Probably the best-known figure among them, however, was Benjamin HenryLatrobe of Baltimore, who had the face of a bank clerk, but whose endorsementalone would perhaps have been enough to settle the whole issue He was the sonand namesake of the famous English-born architect picked by Jefferson to design

or remodel much of Washington, and who rebuilt the Capitol after it was burned

by the British during the War of 1812 He had laid out most of the B&O Railroadand had been in charge of building a number of exceptional bridges in Marylandand Virginia

And finally there was John J Serrell, the only builder of suspension bridges

in the group except for the Roeblings; J Dutton Steele, chief engineer of theReading Railroad; and James Pugh Kirkwood, a rather mournful-lookingScotsman who was an authority on hydraulics, among other things, and who, in

1848, in northeastern Pennsylvania, had built the beautiful stone-archedStarrucca Viaduct, then the most costly railroad bridge in the world

There is no way of knowing what thoughts passed through the minds of suchmen as they first looked over Roebling’s drawings and listened to him talk But

it is also hard to imagine any of them remaining unimpressed for very long, forall their collective experience or their own considerable accomplishments or anyprofessional jealousies there may have been Nor does it seem likely that any ofthem failed to sense the historic nature of the moment Roebling was therecognized giant of their profession, a lesser-Leonardo he would be called, andeven on paper his bridge was clearly one of the monumental works of the age

To an engineer especially that would have been obvious

A bridge over the East River, joining the cities of New York and Brooklyn,had been talked about for nearly as long as anyone could recall According to thebest history of Brooklyn ever written, a three-volume work by a medical doctornamed Henry R Stiles, Volume II of which appeared that same year of 1869, the

idea for a bridge was exactly as old as the century, the first serious proposalhaving been recorded in Brooklyn in 1800 Stiles wrote that an old notation,found in a scrapbook, referred to an unnamed “gentleman of acknowledgedabilities and good sense” who had a plan for a bridge that would take just twoyears to build Probably the gentleman was Thomas Pope of New York, analtogether fascinating character, a carpenter and landscape gardener by trade,who had designed what he called his “Flying Pendent Lever Bridge,” an

invention, as he saw it, available in all sizes and suitable for any site His bridge

to Brooklyn was to soar some two hundred feet over the water, with atremendous cantilever fashioned entirely of wood, like “a rainbow rising on theshore,” he said in the little book he published in 1811 Thomas Pope’s “RainbowBridge” was never attempted, however, and fortunately so, for it would not haveworked But his vision of a heroic, monumental East River bridge persisted Yearafter year others were proposed Chain bridges, wire bridges, a bridge a hundredfeet wide, were recommended by one engineer or another “New York and

Brooklyn must be united,” Horace Greeley declared in the Tribune in 1849,

while in Brooklyn a street running down to the river was confidently christenedBridge Street

But nothing was done The chief problem always was the East River, which

is no river at all technically speaking, but a tidal strait and one of the mostturbulent and in that day, especially, one of the busiest stretches of navigable saltwater anywhere on earth “If there is to be a bridge,” wrote one man, “it musttake one grand flying leap from shore to shore over the masts of the ships Therecan be no piers or drawbridge There must be only one great arch all the wayacross Surely this must be a wonderful bridge.”

In April 1867 a charter authorizing a private company to build and operate

an East River bridge had been voted through at Albany The charter was a mostinteresting and important document, for several different reasons, as time wouldtell But in the things it said and left unsaid concerning the actual structure to bebuilt, it was notable at a glance Not a word was mentioned, for example, aboutthe sort of bridge it was to be or to suggest that its construction might involveany significant or foreseeable problems The cities were not required to approvethe plans or the location The charter said only that it be a toll bridge It wasimportant that it have a “substantial railing” and that it be “kept fully lightedthrough all hours of the night.” It was also to be completed by January 1, 1870

A month after the charter became law, Roebling had been named engineer ofthe work By whom or by what criteria remained a puzzle for anyone trying tofollow the story in the papers In September, that same year, 1867, at a privatemeeting held in Brooklyn, he presented his master plan in a long formal report

But such was “the anxiety manifested on the part of the press of the two cities topresent his report to the public, that it was taken and published, as an entirety…”The bridge had no official name at this point, and in the time since, nobodyseemed able to settle on one.

At an earlier stage it had been referred to occasionally as the Empire Bridge,but the organization incorporated to build it was called the New York BridgeCompany, because the Brooklyn people behind the idea saw it as just that—abridge to New York Roebling, on the other hand, had referred to it as the EastRiver Bridge in his proposal and the newspapers and magazines had picked upthe name But it was also commonly called the Roebling Bridge or the BrooklynBridge or simply the Great Bridge, which looked the most impressive in printand to many seemed the most fitting name of all, once they grasped what exactlyRoebling was planning to do

But it was the possible future impact of such a structure on their own livesthat interested people most, naturally enough, and that the press in both cities

Most appealing of all for the Brooklyn people who went to New York toearn a living every day was the prospect of a safe, reliable alternative to the EastRiver ferries Winds, storms, tides, blizzards, ice jams, fog, none of these, theywere told, would have the slightest effect on Mr Roebling’s bridge There would

be no more shoving crowds at the ferryhouse loading gates There would be nomore endless delays One Christmas night a gale had caused the river to be solow the ferries ran aground and thousands of people spent the night in the Fulton

“no decent place” to make a home, neither he nor anyone else thus far havingimagined a city growing vertically “Brooklyn happens to be one of those things

that can expand,” wrote the editors of the new Brooklyn Monthly “The more you

put into it, the more it will hold.”

And such highly regarded Brooklyn residents as Walt Whitman and James S

T Stranahan, the man behind Brooklyn’s new Prospect Park, looked to the daywhen the bridge would make Brooklyn and New York “emphatically one,”which was also generally taken to be a very good thing, since the new UnionPacific Railroad was going to make New York “the commercial emporium of theworld.” This was no idle speculation, “but the natural and legitimate result ofnatural causes,” according to John Roebling His bridge was part of a largermission “As the great flow of civilization has ever been from East towards theWest, with the same certainty will the greatest commercial emporium be located

on this continent, which links East to the West, and whose mission it is in thehistory of mankind to blend the most ancient civilization with the most modern.”The famous engineer, it had been noticed in Brooklyn, tended to cosmicconcepts, but so much the better If there were now forty million people crossingthe East River every year, as was the claim, then, he said, in ten years’ time therewould be a hundred million

“Lines of steamers, such as the world never saw before, are now plowing theAtlantic in regular straight line furrows,” he had written in his proposal “Thesame means of communication will unite the western coast of this continent tothe eastern coast of Asia New York will remain the center where these linesmeet.”

This, in other words, was to be something much more than a large bridgeover an important river It was to be one of history’s great connecting works,symbolic of the new age, like the Atlantic cable, the Suez Canal, and thetranscontinental railroad “Lo, Soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from thefirst?” wrote Walt Whitman at about this time “The earth be spann’d, connected

by network…The lands welded together.” “The shapes arise!” wrote the

The completed work, when constructed in accordance with my designs,will not only be the greatest bridge in existence, but it will be the greatestengineering work of the continent, and of the age Its most conspicuousfeatures, the great towers, will serve as landmarks to the adjoining cities,and they will be entitled to be ranked as national monuments As a greatwork of art, and as a successful specimen of advanced bridge engineering,this structure will forever testify to the energy, enterprise and wealth of thatcommunity which shall secure its erection.

Roebling had written that in 1867, at the very start of his formal proposal,but in all the time since, for some mysterious reason, not a spade of dirt had beenturned and numbers of people, some claiming to be experts, had begun sayingthey were not so sure about Roebling’s “advanced engineering,” or whether itwas worth the six to seven million dollars he had said it would cost, an estimatethat did not include the price of the land required Even if his figures wererealistic, the bridge would also be about the most expensive ever built

The editors of Scientific American said a tunnel would serve the purpose as

well and cost less A Navy engineer presented an alternative plan He wanted toblock off “the vexatious East River” with a dam several hundred feet wide onwhich he would build highways, stores, docks, and warehouses By early 1869,when it looked as though the bridge might actually be started, the critics weresounding forth as never before Warehouse owners along the river and others inthe shipping business were calling it an obstruction to navigation and a publicnuisance The New York Polytechnic Society put on a series of lectures atCooper Union devoted exclusively to the supposed engineering fallacies of theRoebling plan Engineers expressed “grave apprehension.” The bridge, it was

stated on the best professional authority, was a monumental extravagance, “a

To begin with it was to be the largest suspension bridge in the world It was

to be half again the size of his bridge over the Ohio at Cincinnati, for example,and nearly twice the length of Telford’s famous bridge over the Menai Strait, inWales, the first suspension bridge of any real importance It was to cross the EastRiver with one uninterrupted central span, held aloft by huge cables slung fromthe tops of two colossal stone towers and secured on either shore to massivemasonry piles called anchorages These last structures alone, he said, would be agood seven stories tall, or taller than most buildings in New York at the time.They would each take up the better part of a city block and would be heavyenough to offset the immense pull of the cables, but hollow inside, to provide,Roebling suggested, room for cavernous treasury vaults, which he claimedwould be the safest in America and ample enough to house three-quarters of allthe investments and securities in the country

The towers, the “most conspicuous features,” would be identical and 268feet high They would stand on either side of the river, in the water but close toshore, their foundations out of sight beneath the riverbed Their mostdistinguishing features would be twin Gothic arches—two in each tower—through which the roadways were to pass These arches would rise more than ahundred feet, like majestic cathedral windows, or the portals of triumphalgateways “In a work of such magnitude, and located as it is between two greatcities, good architectural proportions should be observed,” wrote the engineer

“…The impression of the whole will be that of massiveness and strength.”

His towers would dwarf everything else in view They would reign over thelandscape like St Peters in Rome or the Capitol dome in Washington, as onenewspaper said In fact, the towers would be higher than the Capitol dome if thedome’s crowning statue of Freedom was not taken into account So this in theyear 1869—when the Washington Monument was still an ugly stone stump—meant they would be about the largest, most massive things ever built on theentire North American continent On the New York skyline only the slim spire ofTrinity Church at the head of Wall Street reached higher

The towers were to serve two very fundamental purposes They would bearthe weight of four enormous cables and they would hold both the cables and theroadway of the bridge high enough so they would not interfere with traffic on theriver Were the two cities at higher elevations, were they set on cliffs, orpalisades, such as those along the New Jersey side of the Hudson, for example,such lofty stonework would not be necessary As it was, however, only very talltowers could make up for what nature had failed to provide, if there was to bethe desired clearance for sailing ships And as the mass of the anchorages had to

be 67,850 tons, but with the weight of the roadway and its iron superstructureadded on they would each weigh 72,603 tons

The suspended roadway’s great “river span” was to be held between thetowers by the four immense cables, two outer ones and two near the middle ofthe bridge floor These cables would be as much as fifteen inches in diameterand each would hang over the river in what is known as a catenary curve, thatperfect natural form taken by any rope or cable suspended from two points,which in this case were the summits of the two stone towers At the bottom ofthe curve each cable would join with the river span, at the center of the span Butall along the cables, vertical “suspenders,” wire ropes about as thick as a pickhandle, would be strung like harp strings down to the bridge floor And acrossthose would run a pattern of diagonal, or inclined, stays, hundreds of heavy wireropes that would radiate down from the towers and secure at various pointsalong the bridge floor, both in the direction of the land and toward the center ofthe river span

The wire rope for the suspenders and stays was to be of the kindmanufactured by Roebling at his Trenton works It was to be made in the sameway as ordinary hemp rope, that is, with hundreds of fine wires twisted to form arope The cables, however, would be made of wire about as thick as a leadpencil, with thousands of wires to a cable, all “laid up” straight, parallel to one

another, and then wrapped with an outer skin of soft wire, the way the basestrings of a piano are wrapped.

But most important of all, Roebling was talking about making the cables ofsteel, “the metal of the future,” instead of using iron wire, as had always beendone before There was not a bridge in the country then, not a building in NewYork or in any city as yet, built of steel, but Roebling was seriously consideringits use and the idea was regarded by many engineers as among the mostrevolutionary and therefore questionable features of his entire plan

The way he had designed it, the enormous structure was to be a grandharmony of opposite forces—the steel of the cables in tension, the granite of thetowers in compression “A force at rest is at rest because it is balanced by some

other force or by its own reaction,” he had once written in the pages of Scientific

American He considered mathematics a spiritual perception, as well as the

highest science, and since all engineering questions were governed by “simplemathematical considerations,” the suspension bridge was “a spiritual or idealconception.”

His new bridge was to be “a great avenue” between the cities, he said Itsover-all width was to be eighty feet, making it as spacious as Broadway itself, as

he liked to tell people, and the river span would measure sixteen hundred feet,from tower to tower, making it the longest single span in the world But of evengreater import than length was the unprecedented load the bridge was designed

But because of the great elevation of the river span and the relativelylowlying shores, the rest of the bridge, sloping down to ground level, would have

to extend quite far inland on both sides to provide an easy grade The bridgewould have to descend back to earth rather gradually, as it were, and thus thebetter part of it would be over land, not water Those inland sections of thebridge between the towers and the two anchorages were known as the landspans, and were also supported by the cables, by suspenders and diagonal stays

to the left, heading nearly due west, but then it quickly turned down the mapagain to merge with the harbor And it was right there, where the river turned thesecond time, right about where the Fulton Ferry crossed, that Roebling had puthis “Park Line” connecting New York, on the upper left of the map, withBrooklyn, on the lower right.

The precise terminating point on the New York side was at Chatham Street,

opposite the park This was the place for the bridge to come in, he said For the

next fifty years the park would remain “the great focus of travel, from whichspeedy communications will ramify in all directions.” From there his red linecrossed over North William Street, William, Rose, Vandewater, and half a dozenmore streets, to the end of Pier 29, then over the river, straight through one of theFulton Ferry slips, and into Brooklyn Running parallel with Fulton Street,Brooklyn’s main thoroughfare, the line cut across a patchwork of narrow crossstreets—Water, Dock, Front, James—to Prospect, where it bent slightly towardFulton, terminating finally in the block bounded by Prospect, Washington,Sands, and Fulton, or right about where St Ann’s Church stood

Down the center of the bridge Roebling planned to run a double pair oftracks to carry specially built trains pulled by an endless cable, which would bepowered by a giant stationary steam engine housed out of sight on the Brooklynside In time these trains would connect with a system of elevated railroads inboth cities and become a lucrative source of revenue He had worked it all out.His bridge trains would travel at speeds up to forty miles an hour A one-way tripwould take no more than five minutes It was certain, he said, that forty millionpassengers a year could be accommodated by such a system, “without confusionand without crowding.”

Carriages, riders on horseback, drays, farm wagons, commercial traffic ofevery kind, would cross on either side of the bridge trains, while directlyoverhead, eighteen feet above the tracks, he would build an elevated boardwalkfor pedestrians, providing an uninterrupted view in every direction This uniquefeature, he said, would become one of New York’s most popular attractions

“This part I call the elevated promenade, because its principal use will be to

allow people of leisure, and old and young invalids, to promenade over the

bridge on fine days, in order to enjoy the beautiful views and the pure air.” Therewas no bridge in the world with anything like it And he added, “I need not statethat in a crowded commercial city, such a promenade will be of incalculablevalue.”

So the roadways and tracks at one level were for the everyday traffic of life,while the walkway above was for the spirit The bridge, he had promised, was toserve the interests of the community as well as those of the New York BridgeCompany Receipts on all tolls and train fares would, he asserted, pay for theentire bridge in less than three years To build such a bridge, he said, would takefive years

Horatio Allen and William McAlpine asked the most questions during thesessions Roebling held with the consultants The length of the central span andthe tower foundations were the chief concerns

It had been said repeatedly by critics of the plan that a single span of suchlength was impossible, that the bridge trains would shake the structure to piecesand, more frequently, that no amount of calculations on paper could guaranteehow it might hold up in heavy winds, but the odds were that the great river spanwould thrash and twist until it snapped in two and fell, the way the WheelingBridge had done (a spectacle some of his critics hoped to be on hand for, tojudge by the tone of their attacks)

Roebling told his consultants that a span of sixteen hundred feet was notonly possible with a suspension bridge, but if engineered properly, it could bedouble that A big span was not a question of practicability, but cost It was quitecorrect that wind could play havoc with suspension bridges of “ordinary design.”But he had solved that problem long since, he assured them, in his earlierbridges, and this bridge, big as it was, would be quite as stable as the others.Like his earlier works, this was to be no “ordinary” bridge For one thing it

would be built six times as strong as it need be The inclined stays, for example,

would have a total strength of fifteen thousand tons, enough to hold up the floor

by themselves If all four cables were to fail, he said, the main span would notcollapse It would sag at the center, but it would not fall His listeners were verymuch impressed

There were questions about his intended use of steel and about theextraordinary weight of the bridge Then at one long session they had discussedthe foundations

Roebling planned to sink two tremendous timber caissons deep into theriverbed and to construct his towers upon these It was a technique with which

he had had no previous experience, but the engineering had been worked outquite thoroughly, he said, in conjunction with his son, Colonel Roebling, who

had spent nearly a year in Europe studying the successful use of similarfoundations McAlpine could vouch for the basic concept, since he had used ithimself successfully, although on a vastly smaller scale, to sink one of the piersand the abutment for a drawbridge across the Harlem River His caisson for thepier had been of iron and just six feet in diameter Those Roebling was talkingabout would be of pine timbers and each one would cover an area of someseventeen thousand square feet, or an area big enough to accommodate fourtennis courts with lots of room to spare Nothing of the kind had ever beenattempted before.

How deep did he think he would have to go to reach a firm footing, theengineers wished to know Would he go to bedrock? And did he have any ideahow far down that might be?

During the test borings on the Brooklyn side, the material encountered hadbeen composed chiefly of compact sand and gravel, mixed with clay andinterspersed with boulders of traprock, the latter of which, he allowed, had

“detained this operation considerably.” Gneiss had been struck at ninety-six feet.But below a depth of fifty to sixty feet, the material had been so very compactthat the borehole had remained open for weeks without the customary tubing So

it was his judgment that there would be no need to go all the way to rock Adepth of fifty feet on the Brooklyn side ought to suffice and the whole operationwould probably take a year

About the prospects on the New York side, he was rather vague—but itlooked, he said, as though bedrock was at 106 feet and there was a great deal ofsand on the way down Still there was a chance that rock might be found closer

to the surface An old well near Trinity Church showed gneiss at twenty-six feet,

he noted, and in the well at City Hall the same rock was found at ninety feet

“The whole of Manhattan Island appears to rest upon a gneiss and graniteformation,” he said The greatest depth to which similar caissons had been sunkbefore this was eighty-five feet But he was willing to take his to a depth of 110feet if that was what had to be done His consultants said they did not think hewould find that necessary

Presently they took up the question of the timber foundations and their fate,once he left them buried forever beneath the towers, beneath the river, the rock,sand and muck of the riverbed In his report, Roebling had explained at somelength how the caissons would be packed with concrete once they were sunk tothe desired position, and why, in their final resting place, well below the levelwhere water or sea worms could reach them, they would last forever But therewere some among the consultants who wished to hear more on the subject andwho had a number of questions

That particular session on the foundations had taken place on March 9 Twodays later, on the 11th, it was announced that the renowned engineers hadapproved the Roebling plan, “in every important particular.” Their official reportwould come later, but in the meantime the public could rest assured that the planwas “entirely practicable.”

Only Congressional authorization was needed now, since Congress hadjurisdiction over all navigable waters and the bridge was to be a post road.Unlike the government in Albany, or those in either city, the government inWashington had some regulations it wished to see adhered to Congressionallegislation already drawn up stipulated that the bridge must in no way “obstruct,impair, or injuriously modify” navigation on the river In particular, there wasconcern in Washington that it might interfere with traffic to and from the NavyYard, and to be certain that every detail of the plan was fully understood,General A A Humphreys, Chief of the Army Engineers, decided to appoint hisown review panel to give an opinion on it, irrespective of the conclusionsreached by Roebling’s consultants (This was to be the only public scrutiny of thedesign or the location.) So at about that point it had seemed the most sensiblenext step would be for everyone to go take a look at some of Roebling’s existingworks to see how he had previously handled somewhat analogous situations Lethis work speak for itself, he had decided

The tour was arranged almost overnight and if there was any initial intention

to restrict it to a relatively small body of professionals that idea was speedilyoverruled A total of twenty-one gentlemen and one lady made up the “BridgeParty,” as it was referred to in subsequent accounts In addition to the twoRoeblings, the seven consultants, and three Army engineers—General HoratioWright, General John Newton, and Major W R King—several prominentBrooklyn businessmen were invited, most of whom were or were about tobecome stockholders in the New York Bridge Company A BrooklynCongressman named Slocum—General Henry W Slocum—was included, aswere Hugh McLaughlin, the Democratic “Boss” of Brooklyn, and William C.Kingsley, Brooklyn’s leading contractor, who was known to be the drivingpolitical force behind the bridge and the largest individual stockholder Howmany of the party were aware that the tall, powerful Kingsley would also bepersonally covering all expenses for the tour, in addition to the seven thousanddollars in consultants’ fees, is not known

Two young engineers, C C Martin and Samuel Probasco, both of whom hadworked for Kingsley on different Brooklyn projects, were also to go, as was thewife of one of the consultants, Mrs Julius Adams, who is described only as an

“amiable lady” in existing accounts Why she consented to join the group, or

There were, however, two very important public figures who did not makethe trip, both of whom had done much to bring the project along as far as it hadcome and who ought to be mentioned at this point in the story.

The first was State Senator Henry Cruse Murphy, lawyer, scholar, the mostrespected and respectable Democrat in Brooklyn, and in Albany the leadingspokesman for Brooklyn’s interests Murphy had worked harder for the bridgethan anyone in Brooklyn except Kingsley, the contractor He was the one whohad written the charter for the New York Bridge Company He had seen itthrough the legislature and was currently serving as the company’s president.Why he failed to make the trip is not known and probably not important But hewould have added a certain tone to the group certainly and John A Roebling, inparticular, would doubtless have enjoyed his company (The idea of Roeblingkeeping company with the likes of Boss McLaughlin must have raised many aneyebrow on Brooklyn Heights.)

But the absence of the second missing party was quite intentional, one can

so cement friendships as a long train ride, Thomas Kinsella would write—andparticularly, it was presumed, everyone would get to know the key man in allthis, John A Roebling

The great engineer was still largely a mystery to the people who had hiredhim Except for the times when he had expounded on his plan at the meeting in

1867, his Brooklyn clients had seen very little of him Their ordinary day-to-daydealings had been with his son It had been young Roebling, not his father, whohad set up the makings of an office and who had taken a house on the Heights

in Brooklyn only now and then, and staying no longer than necessary His timewas always short it seemed and even when meeting with his board of consultants

he had kept each session quite formal and to the point He had no time foranything but business, and no small talk whatever

On occasion the two of them, father and son, would be seen walking onHicks Street, talking intently, or down by the slate-gray river pacing about thespot where the tower was to rise, the father pointing this way and that with hisgood hand They resembled each other in height and build, even trimmed theirwhiskers the same way But while the son was quite handsome in theconventional sense, with strong regular features, the father’s face was acomposite of hard angles and deep creases, of large ears and nose and deep-sunken eyes, all of which gave the appearance of having been hewn from somesubstance of greater durability than mortal flesh

Most people, later, would talk about his eyes, his fierce pale-blue eyes Butjust what sort of human being there might be behind them was a puzzle He was

a man of enormous dignity, plainly enough, full of purpose and irondetermination, but accustomed to deference just as plainly, somebody to beadmired from a distance His look was all-knowing and not in the least friendly.Among those who were about to stake so very much on him and his bridge, orwho already had, there was not one who could honestly say he knew the man.And so on the evening of April 14, 1869, when General Grant and his Juliawere just taking up residence in the White House and the dogwood werebeginning to bloom across the lowlands of New Jersey, the Bridge Party boarded

a private palace car in Jersey City and started west The only one missing fromthe group was the elder Roebling, who was to get on at Trenton

2 Man of Iron

We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has beenaccomplished without passion

—G W F HEGEL

ANYONE from Trenton who happened to be standing nearby on the depotplatform that lovely April evening would have known who he was, and verypossibly why he was waiting there Trenton was still a small town, for all thechanges there had been, and Old Man Roebling, as the men at the mill calledhim, was Trenton’s first citizen The whole town looked up to him and tookpride in his accomplishments

It was commonly said that he had done more in one life than any ten men.The town had seen him build the wire business from nothing, raise sevenchildren, bury two others and one wife, then marry again when he was past sixty

He had survived hard times, fires, cholera epidemics, the hazards ofbridgebuilding, accidents at the mill, and his own particular notions aboutmaintaining good health, which to some may have seemed the surest sign of allthat the man was indestructible

John Roebling was a believer in hydropathy, the therapeutic use of water

Come headaches, constipation, the ague, he would sit in a scalding-hot tub forhours at a time, then jump out and wrap up in ice-cold, slopping-wet bed sheetsand stay that way for another hour or two He took Turkish baths, mineral baths.

He drank vile concoctions of raw egg, charcoal, warm water, and turpentine, andthere were dozens of people along Canal Street who had seen him come stridingthrough his front gate, cross the canal bridge, and drink water “copiously”—gallons it seemed—from the old fountain beside the state prison (“This water Irelish much…” he would write in his notebook.) “A wet bandage around the

neck every night, for years, will prevent colds he preached to his family “A full

cold bath every day is indispensable…” Illness he regarded as a moral offense

and he fought it with the same severe intensity he directed to everything else hedid in life

The town knew all about him, or thought so It was common knowledge, forexample, that he was an inventor as well as an engineer, that he had designedevery piece of machinery in the mill, that he was an artist, that he wroteprolifically for scientific periodicals, that he read Emerson and Channing andother freethinkers At home he was writing his own “Theory of the Universe.”When he first came to Trenton, he had played both the piano and the flute,but then he caught his left hand in a rope machine and was left with threeimmovable fingers Not long after his first wife died, he had taken upspiritualism There had been talk ever since of after-dark gatherings, of tablerappings and the like, inside the big Roebling house The old man, on top of hisother achievements, was now said to be on speaking terms with the dead

The bridges were what he was best known for, of course, but only a fewpeople in Trenton had actually seen any of them, except perhaps for a view in

Harper’s Weekly or one of the other picture magazines Roebling the industrialist

was the man Trenton people knew

He was called a man of iron Poised…confident…unyielding…imperious…severe…proud…are other words that would be used in Trenton to describe him.There had always been something distant about him; he kept apart and had noreal friends in Trenton, but he had also been accepted on those terms long sinceand he in turn was always extremely courteous to everyone “He was always thefirst to say good morning,” a man from the mill would tell a reporter afterRoebling’s death When he spoke they listened

Roebling was sixty-three in 1869, but even when he was years younger, hehad a special hold on men, it seems, with his commanding stares and wintryscowls, like an Old Testament prophet His success in everything he turned hishand to was generally attributed to an inflexible will and extraordinaryresourcefulness “He was never known to give in or own himself beaten,” one of

his employees would recall and another would quote a saying of his they allknew by heart, “If one plan won’t do, then another must.” Charles B Stuart, anengineer and author who knew Roebling, would later write: “One of hisstrongest moral traits was his power of will, not a will that was stubborn, but acertain spirit, tenacity of purpose, and confident reliance upon self instinctivefaith in the resources of his art that no force of circumstance could divert himfrom carrying into effect a project once matured in his mind….” It was a quality

he had worked hard to instill in his children as well

Time was something never to be squandered If a man was five minutes latefor an appointment with him, the appointment was canceled Once, during thewar, so the story went, he had been called to Washington by the War Department

to give advice on something or other and was asked to wait outside the office ofGeneral John Charles Frémont, the illustrious “Pathfinder.” Roebling took out apencil, wrote a note on the back of his card, and had it sent in to the general

“Sir,” the note said, “you are keeping me waiting John Roebling has not theleisure to wait upon any man.”

In all his working life John Roebling had never been known to take a dayoff

three, or past the age, he knew, when most brilliant men do their best work Hehad had no money to speak of then and not much of a reputation All that hadcome in the years since How much was generally known in Trenton of his lifeprior to that time can only be guessed at, but the story was well known amonghis family certainly, and, for the most part, in the engineering profession

He had settled in Trenton twenty years before, in 1849, when he was forty-He had been born on June 12, 1806, in Germany, in the province of Saxony,

in the ancient walled town of Mühlhausen, where for about a thousand yearsmore or less not very much had ever happened Bach had once played the organ

in the church where he was baptized and in the spring of 1815, when Roeblingwas nine, five hundred of his townsmen had marched off to fight Napoleon atWaterloo, but other than that no one in Mühlhausen had ever done much out ofthe ordinary

His father, Christoph Polycarpus Roebling, had a tobacco shop and theaccepted picture of him is of an unassuming, rather comfortably fixed burgher ofgood family, who had no desire to be anything more than what he was and whosmoked up about as much tobacco as he sold Roebling’s mother, however, was afiercely energetic sort, with a mind of her own and some very fixed ideas aboutgetting on in the world It was their proud, determined, long-departed

grandmother, Friederike Dorothea, John Roebling’s children were raised tounderstand, who scraped and saved to send their father to the famousPolytechnic Institute in Berlin, and who later was the first to support his decision

to leave Mühlhausen, something no Roebling had done before

In Berlin, he had studied architecture, bridge construction, and hydraulics

He also studied philosophy under Hegel, who, according to one biographicalmemoir, “avowed that John Roebling was his favorite pupil.” The renownedphilosopher had been preaching a powerful doctrine of self-realization and thesupremacy of reason to a generation of ardent young liberals hemmed in by anautocratic Prussian regime The effect was pronounced, and not the least onRoebling The contact with Hegel was a privilege and a calamity for Roebling,according to an old family friend in Trenton Hegel had taught Roebling to thinkindependently, he said, and to rely on the validity of his own conclusions, but theexperience was a calamity “because it begat a pride and arrogance of opinionand a frigid intellectuality that came near putting the heart of him into coldstorage.” But according to family tradition, it was Hegel who started the youngman thinking about America “It is a land of hope for all who are wearied of thehistoric armory of old Europe,” Hegel taught There the future would be built.There in all that “immeasurable space” a man might determine his own destiny.For three years after leaving Berlin, Roebling worked in an obligatory jobbuilding roads for the Prussian government Once during a holiday in Bavaria,

he had hiked to the old cathedral town of Bamberg, where he saw his firstsuspension bridge, a new iron chain bridge over the Regnitz and known locally

as the “miracle bridge.” He walked about it, made a number of sketches, and it isthe traditional story that he decided then and there on his life’s career

In any event, not long afterward, in the spring of 1831, the year Hegel woulddie of cholera, Roebling returned to Mühlhausen and began organizing a party ofpilgrims to leave for America, something that had to be done with caution justthen since the government frowned on the immigration of anyone with technicaltraining

Talk of immigration was a common thing in Germany Ever since the JulyRevolution of the previous year, there had been increasingly less personalfreedom, less opportunity for anyone with ambition Nothing could beaccomplished, Roebling would write, “without first having an army ofgovernment councilors, ministers, and other functionaries deliberate about it forten years, make numerous expensive journeys by post, and write so many longreports about it, that for the amount expended for all this, reckoning compoundinterest for ten years, the work could have been completed.”

In the first week of May there had been the farewell visits with school

friends and aged aunts, the last Sunday at church, the final evening walksthrough the ancient cobblestone streets Then on the morning of the 11th, withhis older brother Karl and a number of others, he had set off His determinationnow was to become…an American farmer! Having had no previous experience

in agriculture, having nothing in his background, training, or temperament thatwould indicate any interest in or bent for such work, he would become a man ofthe soil, in a distant land he knew only by reputation The architect, the scholar,the musician, the philosopher, the engineer, the burning liberal idealist, thetwenty-four-year-old bachelor, would now plant himself, willfully, somewhere inthe American wilderness His ambition was to establish his own community,which if not utopian in the religious sense—like Harmony, Pennsylvania, orsome of the other earlier settlements founded by zealous Germans—would atleast provide the honest German farmer, tradesman, or mechanic, men good withtheir hands and accustomed to work, a place where they could make the most ofthemselves, which to Roebling’s particular way of thinking would be about thenearest thing possible to heaven on earth

He never saw Mühlhausen or Germany again In 1867, to prepare for thebridge at Brooklyn, he had sent his son Washington and his pretty, pregnantdaughter-in-law back across the Atlantic It was a journey he would have liked tohave made himself no doubt He could have returned in triumph As it was, theyoung couple arrived at Mühlhausen to a rousing welcome, and in a small innacross the street from the old family home, his first grandson and namesake hadbeen born Later, he had sent the town a sizable gift of cash in gratitude

In a bookshop in Mühlhausen in 1867, Washington Roebling found a rareprinted edition of the journal his father had kept on route to America, which

Washington carried with him on his own return voyage Diary of My Journey

from Muehlhausen in Thuringia via Bremen to the United States of North America in the Year 1831 it is titled It is an extraordinary little document, a

recognized classic of its kind, describing days of howling winds and high seas,and a steamboat—the first Roebling had been—laboring mightily by, and later,like a specter, a derelict hulk of an abandoned sailing ship, a huge brig with allsails gone, drifting on the horizon; then days of no wind and bad drinking water,the burial at sea of a child, and at last, on a night in July, the smell of land in awarm westerly wind “The odor was strikingly distant and…would also indicatethat the entire American mainland is covered with an almost uninterrupted forestand a great abundance of plants, whereby the atmosphere is saturated witharomatic particles, which the winds blowing away from land carry away to agreat distance This scent of land produced a beneficial effect upon all thepassengers.”

His band of pilgrims consisted of fifty-three men, women, and children,

most of whom had never laid eyes on salt water Their ship was the August

Eduard, a 230-ton American packet bound for Philadelphia, which, in all, took

eleven weeks to make port, or longer than it had taken Columbus to make hisfirst crossing

Roebling himself was an immigrant of a kind the history books would paylittle attention to, chiefly because they were so relatively few in number He wasseeking neither religious freedom nor release from the bondage of poverty Hisquest was for something else He came equipped with the finest educationEurope could offer, he had a profession, and he was traveling first class, whichmeant he had one bed among four in a cabin he described as “very roomy” and

“excellently lighted.” Between them, he and his brother were also carryingsomething in the neighborhood of six thousand dollars in cash, a princely sum,and he had come on board with a whole trunkful of books—thick geographies,

works of physics and chemistry, a German-French dictionary, Euclid’s Elements,

volumes of English literature and poetry, and one of English essays that openedwith a favorite quote from Johnson: “No man was ever great by imitation.”

What the American captain and his crew thought of this spare, incrediblyenergetic young German can be imagined He started right off, for example, byinstructing them on how to build a proper privy for the passengers in steerage,whose only facility was the usual sailor’s seat perched precariously outside thestem of the ship, beside the bowsprit Such an arrangement, Roeblingannounced, was altogether unacceptable for the women and children, or foranyone who might become sick or weakened by the voyage He and the othercabin passengers, like the ship’s officers, were entitled to use a relativelycomfortable, enclosed affair that protected its occupant from sudden waveswashing across the deck The same or better should be made available for all onboard, Roebling declared He explained how it could be done and it was done

“If one earnestly desires it,” he wrote, “everything will be brought to pass, even

on board a ship…” The great thing, he believed, was getting people “to leave theaccustomed rut.”

His curiosity about all aspects of seamanship, navigation, ocean currents,rules for passengers, or the personal life history of the captain and each member

of the crew seemed inexhaustible He wanted to know the name of every sail,every stay, brace, bowline, halyard, every rope and how each one worked and hemade diagrams to be sure he understood He talked to the captain (“a very just,

straightforward, and sober man”) about astronomy, meteorology, philosophy,

history, about Isaac Newton and the American coinage system He was the firstone on deck in the morning and generally the last to leave at night, and once,

when nearly every passenger was miserably seasick and lay groaning in hisberth, Roebling, his head spinning, his stomach churning, was resolutely walkingthe deck The malady, he rationalized, “involves no danger at all,” noting that “acheerful carefree disposition and a manly, vigorous spirit will have greatinfluence on the sickness.”

For his son there must have been places in the old diary where the youthfuland impressionable narrator seemed a little difficult to identify with the father hehad known One entry, for example, was taken up almost entirely with a long,vivid description of waves Apparently his father had stood at the bowspritwatching them for hours on end and to no particular purpose In the account ofphosphorescence after dark, as the sea rebounded from the sides of the ship, itwas as though the writer had been caught up in a spell:

…then one perceives in the foam brightly shining stars, which appear aslarge as the fixed stars in the heavens Along the entire side of the ship thefoam has turned into fiery streaks The spots of foam in the ocean, distantfrom the ship, which arise from the dashing together of the waves, appear inthe dark night to the astonished eye as just so many fiery masses In front ofthe bowsprit, where the friction is greatest, the scintillation is often sobright, that the entire fore part of the ship is illuminated by it

For the moment—except possibly for the word “friction”—it was as ifnature was not something to be explained endlessly or to be “renderedsubservient,” as John Roebling would say in another time and place And again,

as the ship headed into Delaware Bay, there is a moment when the gifted younggraduate of Berlin’s Polytechnic Institute reflects with sadness on the Indianswho once lived on shore—“quietly on the property inherited from theirancestors,” long before “the sheltered loneliness of these wild surroundings wasinterrupted by the all-disturbing European.”

From Philadelphia, Roebling and his followers headed west acrossPennsylvania, having decided to settle on the other side of the Alleghenies AtPittsburgh he and Karl purchased some seven thousand acres located to thenorth, in Butler County, not far from Harmony (the price was $1.37 an acre, with

a thousand dollars down and the balance to be paid in two equal yearly

installments “without interest,” as he wrote home) And there he established his

town, first laying out one broad Main Street exactly east-west, in the Germanfashion He called the town Germania for a while, but then changed it to

Roebling had concluded, his son Washington would write in jest, thatwestern Pennsylvania was destined to be “the future center of the universe withthe future Saxonburg as the head center, which then was a primeval forest wherewild pigeons would not even light.”

“My father would have made a good advertising agent,” Washington wouldremark at another time “He wrote at least a hundred letters to friends in andabout Mühlhausen, extolling the virtues of the place—its fine climate—the

freedom from restraint—the certainty of employment, etc Many accepted and

came To each one was sent exact directions how to come, what to take—what tobring along, and what to leave behind Most tools were to be left behind, becauseAmerican tools were so much better, such as axes, hatchets, saws, grubbing hoes

—nodody could cut down a tree with a German ax.”

The beginning is hard, Roebling had warned But there were “no unbearabletaxes,” no police commissioners And finally: “If this region is built up byindustrious Germans, then it can become an earthly paradise.” But the soil turnedout to be mostly clay, the winters were bleak and bitterly cold, and the roads toPittsburgh or to Freeport, the nearest point on the Allegheny River, were

“atrocious.”

Among the early arrivals there were only two who knew a thing aboutfarming But according to one of the old histories of the town, they all

“possessed to a remarkable degree the valuable attribute of industry, and, thoughmany of their first attempts were ludicrous and miserable failures, they yetpersevered until they became adepts at handling the ax and agriculturalimplements.” Every newcomer was heartily welcomed and encouraged to stay.Presently more and more did come and settle and the surrounding country, onlysparsely settled earlier by Scotch-Irish, began filling up with Germans “Theyhave made good farmers,” an old Butler County history concludes, “succeeding,

by patient industry and close economy, in gaining an independent conditionwhere the people of almost any other nationality would have failed, in a majority

of instances, to have secured more than a mere living.”

The first building to go up in Saxonburg was a plain two-story house built byRoebling at the head of Main Street It was clapboard on the outside, but brickbehind that, and like everything he ever built, it was built to last Five years laterSaxonburg, if not exactly paradise, was at least a going concern, populated by aweaver, a grocer, a blacksmith, a cabinetmaker, about six carpenters, a tanner, amiller, a baker, a shoemaker, a Mecklenburg tailor, a Mühlhausen tailor, oneartist, one brewer, a veteran of Waterloo, and an increasing number of plainfarmers with names like Emmerich, Rudert, Goelbel, Heckert, Graff,

Schwietering, Nagler, and Helmhold And in May 1836, in his own front parlor,Roebling married Johanna Herting, the oldest daughter of the Mühlhausen tailor.But in less than a year, with everything going about as well as he could havehoped, Roebling seems to have run up against the one problem he had notfigured on He had become bored When he heard the state was in need ofsurveyors, he immediately wrote to Harrisburg That was in 1837, the year hebecame a citizen, the year Karl died of sunstroke while working in a wheat field,the year Roebling became a father for the first time In a letter to the chiefengineer of the Sandy and Beaver Canal, he wrote, “I cannot reconcile myself to

be altogether destitute of practical occupation…”

“So he took to engineering again, his true vocation,” Washington

Roebling wrote, “and let my mother do the farming again, which she did very

well when he would let her.” By the time the son was old enough to understand

such things, the father’s agrarian dream, if indeed that is what it was, was longsince over

Roebling built dams and locks on the Sandy and Beaver, between the Ohioand the lakes, then on the Allegheny feeder of the Pennsylvania Canal nearFreeport In 1839 he began surveying a prospective railroad route east ofPittsburgh that would later be adopted, in part, by the Pennsylvania Railroad.Living in tents, working in all kinds of weather through the roughest kind ofwilderness, he and a few assistants covered more than 150 miles, plotting a linethrough the Alleghenies His work was such that he was made PrincipalAssistant to the Chief Engineer of the state, a man named Charles L Schlatter,and his report to Schlatter included not only full details on the grades,embankments, bridges, and tunnels required, but a number of propheticobservations about the locale around the village of Johnstown, where one of thenation’s principal iron and steel industries would one day rise “The iron ore onthe Laurel Hill is only waiting for means of transportation to be conveyed to therich coal basins below, where also limestone is to be had in quantity and,moreover, where an abundance of water power can be furnished by the never-failing waters of the beautiful mountain stream…and certainly capitalists couldhardly find a more eligible situation for starting mammoth furnaces on thelargest scale…”

At Johnstown he also became familiar with the workings of the newly builtPortage Railroad, a system of long, inclined planes devised to haul canalboats upand over the Alleghenies, between Hollidaysburg at the foot of the eastern slopeand Johnstown at the foot of the western slope It was popularly thought to beone of the engineering marvels of the age and Roebling was fascinated by it Healso decided, after a good deal of study, that it could be greatly improved by

dispensing with the immense hemp hawsers then in use These were about nineinches around, more than a mile long in some cases and cost nearly threethousand dollars They also wore out in relatively short time and had to bereplaced or, as happened more than once, they snapped in two, sending theirloads crashing down the mountainside In one such accident two men had beencrushed to death.

Roebling proposed to replace the hawsers with an iron rope just an inchthick, a product not made in the United States then, but which he had read about

in a German periodical Such a rope, he said, would be stronger, last longer, and

be much easier to handle Apparently he was the only one who took the ideaseriously, but he was told to go ahead and try if he had such confidence in it—athis own risk and expense

He began fashioning his new product at Saxonburg some time in the summer

of 1841, using the old ropewalk system on a long level meadow behind thechurch he had built soon after finishing his house The wire, purchased from amill at Beaver Falls, northwest of Pittsburgh, was spliced inside a small buildingand wound onto reels for “running out.” Separate strands of wire were laid upfirst, then twisted into the larger rope by means of a crude machine he haddevised, which, like everything else in the process, was powered by hand

A six-hundred-foot rope finished “in the best style,” as he said, was tried out

at Johnstown in September and it was a failure Someone hired by the hemp ropeinterests had secretly cut it at a splice, with the result that it broke during the test.But the sabotage was discovered, Roebling was given a second chance, and hisrope worked with such success that it was soon adopted for the entire Portagesystem Orders began coming in from other canals with similar inclined planes.The rope was wanted for dredging equipment, for pile drivers, for use in coal

mines Roebling published an article on it in the Railroad Journal “His ambition

now became boundless,” his son would write Production in Saxonburg picked

up sharply, as “farmers were metamorphosed into mechanics and an for era of prosperity dawned.”

unlooked-“About eight men were needed for strand making,” according to WashingtonRoebling, “but sixteen or eighteen were required for laying up the rope Thesewere recruited for a day or two from the village and adjacent farm—quite a task

—in which I took my full share The men were always glad to see me because itmeant good pay and free meals for days Work was from sunrise to sunset—three meals, with a snack of bread and butter in between—including whiskey.Meals were served at the house My poor, overworked mother did the cooking—all done on an open hearth.”

John Roebling could be sure, he was told in an admiring letter from Charles

Schlatter, that before long he would be “at the head of the list of thosebenefactors to mankind who employ science to useful purpose.”

In 1844, at age thirty-eight, he got his first real commission as an engineer Aprize of one hundred dollars had been offered in a notice in the Pittsburgh papersfor “the best plan for a wooden or suspension aqueduct” to carry thePennsylvania Canal across the Allegheny River in place of a ponderous,inadequate structure built years earlier by the state Roebling worked out a planfor the world’s first suspension aqueduct He made a model and went toPittsburgh to enter the competition, which he won, mainly because his bid wasthe lowest He built the aqueduct in record time He worked nine monthsnonstop and when he was finished, Pittsburgh, at a cost of $62,000, had astructure unlike any in existence

From two iron cables seven inches in diameter, he had suspended a bigtimber flume, crossing the river with seven spans of about 160 feet each Theflume was sixteen and a half feet wide and eight and a half feet deep It carriedsomething over two thousand tons of water and a steady procession of canalbarges that floated across high over the Allegheny, hauled by mules that walked

a narrow plank towpath * “As this work is the first of the kind ever attempted,”

wrote the Railroad Journal, “its construction speaks well for the enterprise of the

city of Pittsburgh.” But in 1861, after the canal had been put out of business bythe Pennsylvania Railroad that Roebling had helped to lay out, the aqueduct waspulled down

The winter he built the aqueduct had been the most trying, strenuous period

in his life Not only had he designed it himself, but he had directed andparticipated in every step in its construction, in freezing winds, sleet, snow,going back and forth over the spindly catwalk or swinging along one of the cablestrands in a little boatswain’s chair The cables had been strung in place, wire bywire, in much the way his subsequent bridges would be He had also devised anovel technique for anchoring the cables, attaching them to great chains of ironeyebars embedded in masonry, a plan not used in any prior suspension bridgeand the one he would use on every bridge he built thereafter

He had finished in exactly the time he had said he would and no one wasmore keenly aware of the real importance of what he had done than he Judgedagainst his later work, the bridge was crude, small, and uninspiring Andprobably he knew the day it was finished that its life-span would be brief Thesignificant thing was that he had demonstrated the immense weight that could beborne by a suspension bridge, not to mention his own skill and integrity as abuilder

In April of 1845, a month before the aqueduct was opened, more than half of

Pittsburgh burned to the ground “The progress of the fire as it lanced and leapedwith its forked tongue from house to house, from block to block, and fromsquare to square was awfully magnificent,” wrote one observer Among thevictims was an old covered bridge over the Monongahela at Smithfield Streetand as a result Roebling got the chance to build his first real bridge, which wasalso to be the first bridge on the tour he was about to lead.

In 1848 he began four more suspension aqueducts, these on the Delawareand Hudson Canal, linking the hardcoal fields of eastern Pennsylvania with thetidewater of the Hudson In the meantime he wrote articles on his theories and in

1847 presented a twelve-thousand-word paper before the Pittsburgh Board ofTrade (it was read at two sittings) calling for the immediate establishment of

“The Great Central Railroad from Philadelphia to St Louis.” Like a magicwand, he said, the railroads were going to work a transformation over the land Anew nation was about to emerge and this would be the greatest of all railroads,

“a future highway of immense traffic.” It was another of his visionaryproclamations As it was, the Pennsylvania would not be completed to Pittsburghfor five more years, which was longer than John Roebling could wait

It is not known when he first began thinking seriously about leavingSaxonburg, but by 1848, the year after his “Great Central Railroad” speech, with

no such railroad in sight, he had concluded that Saxonburg would not becomethe center of the universe in all likelihood, and that in any event it was nolocation for a wire business Having analyzed the problem as thoroughly as hewas able, he decided to relocate in the old colonial town of Trenton, New Jersey,which then had a total population of perhaps six thousand people

So he had departed from Saxonburg, leaving friends, relatives, everythingthey had struggled for so many years to build, and went east, against the humantide then pouring across Pennsylvania bound for the still-empty country beyondOhio His wife and children were to follow on their own “He was disgusted withSaxonburg,” Washington Roebling wrote, “and never revisited it He was seizedwith a horror of everything Dutch and never alluded to it.” In Saxonburg itwould be said, “The dumb Dutch stayed behind.”

It was a very changed man who was about to return now over that sameroute to Pittsburgh, to retrace his footsteps as it were, and review the best of hislife’s work The bridges had made him famous in the time since, world-famous,and the wire business had made him rich The John A Roebling who stood onthe station platform that April evening in 1869 was worth more than a milliondollars, as his will would subsequently reveal But other things had happened,